Of Thine Enemy's Blood part 1: Interloper
by Psychomorph
Summary: They say it's all in your head. They couldn't be more right.


Of Thine Enemy's Blood part 1: Interloper 

by: Psychomorph 

e-mail: psychomorph@excite.com 

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Pain raced along her flanks like hellfire. Blood seeped slowly from old wounds torn afresh and poured from new wounds freshly opened. Old rations were expelled from her hooves and gave a new stench to the already stinking ship. Mucus mixed with old blood dripped from her nostrils. Her fur was matted or ripped out in too many places. 

Though she was the only living occupant upon the ship, she was not alone. Phantoms and delusions kept her company. The jeering face of a forgotten lover. The astonished looks on her parents faces. The taunts of fellow warriors. Among the odd entourage of ghosts to accompany her along her dusty way to death, none where of friends. She did not see the face of her _shorm_ or that of her sister. She did not see her favorite teacher and trainer. Only the mocking voices of pains she'd though forgotten. 

In the stories and legends of old battles, the heroes never died this way. She would be destroyed in the heat of battle, cut down while firing the final shot to preserve the lives of her comrades, devoured by an enemy twisted into an alien form. But never like this. Never shivering and hungry and weak. Never lying in a pool of their own vomit, blood, and snot. True heroes died with a gleam of triumph in their eyes, a spark of defiance in their final words. 

But heroes were a rare and dying breed. 

She felt such pain in these dying moments. A stalk eye ripped away by a vicious creature never before seen. A gaping wound along her flank which exposed her second ribcage. A leg twisted at an unnatural angle. Through the pain and the hallucinations it caused, she could not muster her concentration and willpower to morph. Her mind was torn and spattered even worse than her physical being. 

There were tales of course, vague utterings to frighten the gullible young _aristh_. There were stories of Andalites gone rogue. Fairy tales about warriors who had seen and done too much, gone and lost in the terrible madness that battle brings. There was no way such a thing could happen. No true Andalite warrior worth her tailblade would succumb to the madness that grew with each battle. The _ugoni_ did not exist. Of course not. 

She had been the scout ship for a small flight group of fighters. Her only job was to find and locate enemy ships and report to the main fighters. Her ship was equipped with the best stealth technology and swiftest transport unit. But no weapons. The _ugoni_ had struck without reason, without warning, without surcease. They struck ruthless and hard. No reason, no pattern could be found in their attacks. The only thing unifying the band of insane fighters was a single-minded purpose to destroy. 

No warrior would have dared many of the flight patterns the _ugoni_ used to destroy the band of fighters. Even though the _ugoni_ lost most of their fighters in the initial wave, they continued to fight with a desperation and obssessiveness that overwhelmed her group. None of her fighters had died quietly. Their thought-speak screams cut and ripped through the communications network connecting the entire group together. Many of their last words were pleadings to someone or something to preserve them. But the Andalites had forsaken any gods that watched over them thousands of years ago. 

Of the reasons why her ship had been spared there was no clue. In her mind there had been only that one hearts killing moment when her ship was boarded. There had been only the scorching pain of a malfunctioning Dracon beam tearing along her flank. There had been only the malformed creature leaping upon her and tearing at her face, dying only very slowly and very violently when she managed to strike it with her tailblade. There had been only the sickening crunch of her leg when an _ugoni_ struck her with the broad side of his own tailblade. And there had was only the menacing and ambiguous parting word of, < Suprise... > whispered into her ears. 

And now there was only the deep and sickening madness conjured by her own mind. She knew deep within her hearts that she was not seeing the battlefields of the gresnin homeworld. She knew that she was not there. But madness was very persistent. Again she smelled and saw the carnage done by the Yeerks. They had discovered too late that the gresnin race were pathetic as host. The battle there had then become one of lowering the enemy's hearts. She remembered seeing friends and distant cousins ripped apart and impaled on stakes or trees or rocks. She remembered the stink of emptied bowels and rotting wounds. She felt again their torn away flesh squelching beneath her hooves. 

Another present of the _ugoni_. It had to be. She distantly remembered smelling a noxious scent upon the air before she saw their faces. Some unseen gas had tumbled and jumbled her senses, enabling them to do whatever it was they had done. And giving her a nice trip back to the gresnin homeworld. 

Suddenly she was torn from her reverie. The sickening sound of twisting and contorting flesh was enough to shake her free of the nightmare. She felt rather than saw her hooves split into taloned toes. Her fur receded into her body and her skin toughened into a hairless dark blue hide. Spikes erupted from her the middle of her forehead and followed straight path along her spine to the tip of her tail. Her tailblade shrank and thinned to one of those blood-purple spikes. The remaining eyestalk upon her head withered into the top of her skull. Two fingers from each hand sank into her flesh while the others thickened and found themselves tipped with talons. Her nostrils became two thin slits while her face assumed reptilian contours. 

Frantically she tried to stop the morph, alarmed at what her body was doing without her command. Despite her screams that her own body stop, she climbed clumsily to her feet. Her head wheeled around peering through slitted irises. Her new feet moved with obvious hesitance towards the console of the ship. And still she could not control her actions. And still she screamed. 

A voice tore through her panic, through her terrible suspicions. < Now Zykahnser, is that anyway to greet your new tenant? > Her silence was immediate. < Welcome to a whole new side of the battle, my friend. Welcome, > the Yeerk said. 

(_too be continued...._) 


End file.
